An evening at the Circolo Harvey Milk in Milan/Italy. With an attentive crowd and engaging topics. Amongst them, two got my attention the most:
1. The dynamic between what the market offers today and what (most) customers demand. All too often I’m asked about plot-driven porn and production values. While I obviously care for both and both attracted me to porn some 20 years ago (let’s call it “auteur porn”. Porn as poetics, as Weltanshauung…), I ultimately run a business with a balance sheet. I stopped directing my ‘big-budget’ features back in 2008 (ITALIANS AND OTHER STRANGERS, GayVN Award Winner for Best Foreign Pcture), came back briefly with ROUGH/TENDER in 2010 and have left my assistants run the show since, with the cheaper ‘reality’ content and the hydraulics customers ask for these days.
2. Same goes with bareback content. While I’m committed to safer sex guidelines (a matter of personal responsibility for me and my label), I can’t pass judgement on my fellow producers keeping an eye on their bottom line and giving customers what they want. Can we effectively sell condom titles, when bareback vids, no matter how poorly produced, far outsell anything ‘mainstream’?
Ultimately, yes, I’m disappointed with gay audiences. Who favor unsafe sex, neglect eroticism, ignore production values and flock to gimmicky and often offensive gay-for-pay properties (Brokestraightboys, HazeHim and the like…). I’m equally disappointed with the majority of wall to wall sex porn produced these days.
Yet I remain optimistic: audiences will eventually wake up and smell the coffee. They’ll grow tired of this pseudo reality diet, its poor gimmicks and its aesthetic indifference. They will begin looking for something… MORE. And that is, my friends, what keeps me going: What will that MORE be? How will gay porn of the future look like